ASUS Rampage III Extreme review

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ASUS Rampage III Extreme

We spot the accustomed reset and power on buttons that ASUS has on all their ROG motherboards. Then left from them we spot four switches. Very simple, these are there to en/disable the corresponding PCIe slots. Weird and unusual you might think, but if one of the PCIe x16 cards is out of order during massive cooled down OC session, you can simply disable it without the need of removing the cards (which typically have LN2 pots sitting on them). So again something for the extreme overclockers.

To the left we see a small red button, that is the Go Button which allows your motherboard to boot even if there might be some compatibility issues between the motherboard and the memory. All the user has to do, is to simply hold this buton, at first a "MemOK!" functions will start visible by a red LED that begins to blink. The motherboard will now take charge of a self-memory patching process, and fix the memory compatibility before your very own eyes, till the system finally able to boot up. Once the system completes the system POST, this button will then become the quick and easy OC button, which overclocks your system to your desired settings once been pressed.

All the way below we can spot Asus ProbeIt feature plugs and pins, allowing you to use a multimeter to measure the major power sources on the motherboard, e.g. voltage measuring points.

Here is something we'd like to see changed, why not incorporate a small diagnostic LED display that cycles through the selected voltages ?

ASUS Rampage III Extreme

All the way to the left we can see a battery of SATA connectors, this board certainly has plenty of them. You'll have nine SATA connectors. Seven of them SATA2, then two red ones, which are SATA 6G. Next to these connectors at the rear IO there is another (external) eSATA2 connector. You'll have plenty of options for SSD/HDD/ODD connectivity alright summing up to 10 SATA ports.
The SATA6G ports are managed by a (non-RAID) Marvell controller and what ASUS does so beautifully .. they implemented it right with an extra PLX creating (needed) bandwidth for the Marvell storage controller. I did not check specifically but it will add either x4 or x8 lanes of PCIe bandwidth, giving the Marvell SATA6G controller plenty of bandwidth while not hogging PCIe lanes from for your graphics cards.

ASUS Rampage III Extreme

We flip the board around again 90 degrees and stumble into internal low-level connectivity like front panel headers and more USB headers. Also we spot:

  • Four x16 PCIe 2.0 slots (supports x16; x16/x16; x16,x8,x8 and x8/x8/x8/x8).
  • 1x PCIe x4
  • 1x PCI

 Let's zoom in a little.

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